Hints on how to choose the right monitoring and management solution

Depending upon your application and requirements, there are several ways to monitor and manage your power devices or the entire infrastructure of your application

Single UPS: Network card
You can usually monitor a single UPS through an optional network card. Our network cards are essentially their own servers, so they record event history, send email and text message alerts, and provide remote access to real-time status. Using a network card is usually the best way to manage one UPS.

Shutdown: Network card and Intelligent Power Protector (IPP)
If your UPS is protecting servers, you can use our software to schedule safe shutdowns and prevent data loss in the event of a prolonged power outage. For an Eaton UPS with a network card, IPP is the Eaton shutdown agent.
IPP communicates directly with the network card (or over USB and serial if needed) to register itself and receive alerts to initiate soft shutdown of your IT systems.

Multiple UPS installations: Network cards and Intelligent Power Manager (IPM)
For multiple UPSs spread out across a network closet, campus or enterprise, IPM software is designed to aggregate and manage your power devices (both UPSs and network-enabled ePDU products).

Virtualisation: Network card and IPMIPM is the industry leader integrating power with virtualisation platforms. The IPM shutdown agent management enables safe shutdown of virtualized servers—even servers in clusters running vCenter or XenCenter. Live migrations can be triggered to transparently move virtual machines to an available server on the network, for data integrity and zero downtime.